Pittsburghers know that the times are out of joint. Somehow they're expecting the prosperity to blow up in their faces.
Fortune Magazine, 1941

Monday, March 09, 2009

Foreclosures - Cleveland, and more real estate

Worth a read... the NYT Magazine has an article on what the foreclosure crisis has meant to Cleveland. See: All Boarded Up, by Alex Kotlowitz

Speaking of real estate... here is a bad factoidto keep an eye on. Bloomberg notes in passing that Pittsburgh ranks high in late payments among "loans packaged into commercial mortgage- backed securities". I guess my first question is how we rank in terms of the proportion of relevant local loans that are covered by that metric.

More real estate..... something I caught last month, but still have not seem any local coverage of is the story of Chinese real estate speculators coming to America. The SF Chronicle has a recent story on how Chinese are coming to buy distressed American Real Estate. See: Cash-rich Chinese coming to do some house hunting. What I really want to know more about is why the most quoted firm facilitating this new market demand is based here in Pittsburgh? Apparently Fortune Group Realty Co (is this their web site?) in the Strip District. Seems to me like it would be worth some local news coverage, but I see nothing. Looks like one of those things where the national and international media is more interested (think Jero?).

The quoted Mr. Chen seems to have another venture foreopen.com that lists real estate assessment appeals as one of its services. If this is all a spinoff of the county's assessment miasma in recent years, that would be great. Remember Bram says today we may learn the Supreme Court's decision on base year assessments.

If the reporting is correct, the prerequisites for Chinese visitors to come on some of these organized tours includes certain income levels, but also that they have to own property in China already. I still think that property ownership in China will prove to be one of the biggest forces of social change in the world impacting the 21st century. That and I keep thinking of this picture of ol Vlad (via the Innovations in Newspapers blog) which may be one of the greatest pictures of the last decade:

2 Comments:

It looks like I was wrong about today being the day. I should hasten to add that I qualified the bejeezus out of my little prediction, saying it was based on some pretty arcane posted guidelines, and a leap of faith that the justices wouldn't want to be seen too conspicuously to delay the ruling. My mistake or their reticence, it looks like I was wrong.